Patient

The following is a guest post from William J. Hall, MD, AARP Board Member. Bill Hall is a geriatrician with a special interest in strategies for successful aging. Last time, I described some of the reasons why both patients and physicians sometimes feel that the office visit is not as satisfying as either would like. Based on many years of caring for older adults, here are a few simple strategies: Make a List. No matter what your age, the most …

The following is a guest post from William J. Hall, MD, AARP Board Member . Bill Hall is a geriatrician with a special interest in strategies for successful aging. Let’s talk about rights. After decades of doing this, I think that far and away the most common concerns I hear relate to the quality of the personal interaction between you the patient and your physician or other health care providers. Everybody seems rushed. There are often questions that you want to …

You would think that hospitals would recognize how important sleep is to a patient’s recovery and would take steps to keep the noise down so people can rest. Yeah, right. Noisy hospital rooms are so pervasive, researchers at the University of Chicago decided to find out if patients’ sleep was suffering because of it. To no one’s surprise, they found that hospital room noise levels are well above recommended levels and can spike to nearly that of a chainsaw. “The …

An alarming new federal study finds that hospital employees report only one out of seven errors, accidents and other mix-ups that harm Medicare patients while they are hospitalized. The New York Times reports that even after hospitals investigate preventable injuries and infections that have been reported, they rarely change their practices to prevent these problems from happening again, according to the study by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Of the 293 cases in which patients had been …

Endless experts have told us that health care costs keep increasing and that the country needs to do something to hold them in check, but is being “parsimonious” with health care decisions really the best, ethical solution? A major medical group thinks so. The new ethics manual for the American College of Physicians (ACP) recommends that doctors practice “parsimonious care” — in other words, they should consider both cost and medical benefit when deciding how to treat their patients. The ACP, …